Address & UPRN Correction
The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN)
Link all of your data to a single, accurate location.
An addressable location may be any kind of building, or it may be an object that might not have a “normal” address – such as a bus shelter or an electricity substation. Ensure that all of your police records are connected to the correct location, by ensuring your record has the correct address and UPRN. UPRNs provide every property (or object) with a consistent identifier throughout its lifecycle, from planning to demolition.
Benefits
By using UPRNs, police officers can link multiple datasets together to get a full picture of what has happened over time at a location.
An address can be written in multiple formats, for example:
- Flat A, 1 Acacia Avenue, Sunnyville, SU1 1AB
- 1 Acacia Avenue, Sunnyville, SU1 1AB
- Pinewoods, 1Acacia Avenue, Sunnyville, SU1 1AB
- Pinewoods, Sunnyville, SU1 1AB
- Flat A, Pinewoods, Acacia Avenue, Sunnyville, SU1 1AB
This not only delays finding information, but can lead to incorrect information being shared, hindering incident response or investigation, and ultimately putting public safety at risk.
By providing police officers with the UPRN they have an undisputed location reference to investigate other datasets such as:
- Neighbouring forces incident data
- Local Authority Records
- DVLA registrations
The end result is evidence linking the correct person to the scene of the crime by supporting the POLE data model (proving the person, object, location and event). By linking all of this data to the correct location, police officers are able to remove people from the street who are a threat to public safety.
How it works
This application takes a no-code, rules-based approach to ensure that each police record has a current and correct UPRN. After police data is submitted to the application, the application will check each police record against the Authoritative Government data to ensure that the police record has the correct UPRN. If the police record does not have the correct UPRN, the application will automatically update the police record’s UPRN with the UPRN from the Authoritative Government data, and audit the change.
Correction of the data can be done at different confidence levels of address matching. If the record is an exact match the UPRN will be updated with a high confidence, and if it is a “fuzzy match” (i.e. a minor spelling mistake detected in one of the records) the correction will still take place but with a lower confidence score. Any records that have been changed but with a lower confidence score can be confirmed by the data quality team before being re-submitted to the live police database. All confidence scores are logged as part of the audit.
An additional audit certificate is produced at the end of the process certifying which data was run through which application and the results of that process, giving full transparency. The automated data correction can be applied to the live police database, or to data temporarily extracted from the live database. However best suits the operating preferences of the police force.
FAQs
You can find the answers to our most frequently asked questions on the Police Data Quality Hub.
Find out more